Say It Ain’t So!
Republican voter fraud?
The alleged signature forgeries continue to pile up in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, where paid campaign staffers for Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) have now been credibly accused of forging at least four dead voters’ signatures, and dozens of others’, on petitions to get an independent candidate on the ballot.
This is double dirty stuff because they did it to get an independent candidate on the ballot to take votes away from the Democrat. So they played “Fool The Voters” and registering dead people makes that all the easier to win. In short, they suck.
Lookie here, a Texas woman on probation voted before her supervised release for a felony and she got 5 years in prison for it.
Another woman, Maria Ortega, was a resident of Texas with a green card. She thought the green card gave her the right to vote. She got 8 years of hard time.
However, I do suspect that these Republican white boys will not be going to jail. Because … you know …
Thanks to Sarah for the heads up.
What crunches my teeth is a woman who obviously is not schooled in civics in this country gets eight years for doing something ignorant whereas the other creeps pitched a deliberate campaign to gain their own ends. Somewhere there has to be a court that would straighten her situation out. Hope that ACLU and the Hispanic Project have heard of this and are jumping on it.
1So far all the deliberate voter fraud I’ve read about has been by Republicans. And I agree that he penalty for voting in ignorance of the law is much too severe and should be cut way down.
2Once officials noticed dead people were signing up to vote as independents, they had to know something was amiss. Everyone knows when you’re dead, you’re also brain dead, and that’s the rock solid foundation of the Republican base.
3In Montana they went one better and put the “Green” candinate on the payroll.
4In all fairness to the Republican rat-f*ckers, let’s not forget the long tradition of the dead rising from the grave to vote for Democrats in Texas. Us old folks remember Ballot Box 13, which turned up belatedly and had the 200 extra votes needed to put Lyndon Johnson into the U.S. Senate:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/go-ask-alice/
“The votes for Johnson were written in the same handwriting, signed in the same ink, and cast in alphabetical order”.
Years later Landslide Lyndon himself would tell the joke about campaigning in South Texas, and some little boy was in the audience crying. He asked the kid what was wrong, and the answer was “my paw died”. Lyndon: sorry to hear that, when did he die? Boy: he died 4 years ago. But last year he came to town and voted for you, but didn’t come by to see me or Maw!
Johnson resurrected the dead partly because in an earlier campaign he was cheated out of a win by the legendary Pappy O’Daniel via similar shenanigans. But I suspect that even in 1940s South Texas they would not have hunted down and given ridiculously long sentences to a couple of women who made a obviously innocent/naive mistake by voting. And let’s face it: even O’Daniel and Johnson would not have had the astounding hypocrisy to complain about and campaign about voting fraud. But modern Republicans seem to just wallow in hypocrisy.
5DOG!! I LOVE LYNDON!
In one of his early congressional campaigns, Lyndon told one of his aides to spread the story that the opponent f*cked pigs. The aide responded “Christ, Lyndon, we can’t call the guy a pigf*cker. It isn’t true.” To which LBJ supposedly replied “Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the sumbitch deny it.”
Of J Edgar Hoover, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
6And then there are inept untrained election clerks who see that a person got a mail in ballot for the Democratic primary last spring and refuse to let them vote in a Harris county bond election in late August. The clerk and the judge kept giving each other the look, and telling us we had applied for and used a mail in ballot. We had not.
Happened to DH and me last Saturday. Oh, they said we could vote provisionally. We all know those ballots are rarely counted, so we just left. Do the people who told us we could not vote go to jail?
7Crone, sorry to hear that your vote was stolen. That is the kind of thing that would send me ballistic, and you can bet I’d demand to know just when the mail-in ballot was requested, what record there is of it, the name of exactly who actually processed it and sent it, what address it was sent to, etc. But I’m obnoxious about those kind of things. [Rumor has it that there’s a Texas lawyer who might be good at pursuing these kind of things … once he gets through showing the world that Alec Jones has the ethics, class, and IQ of rancid mayonnaise. ]
Sadly, there’s also the thought “well, at least they did not throw you into jail and try to prosecute you”. And beyond the personal tragedy of the woman who was sent up for 8 years, that is the real danger of their draconian steps. It’s meant to intimidate even the honest and rightful voters.
8Isn’t it interesting that when republicans whine about Demo voting fraud, they must go clear back to the late 1940’s to find even a maybe.
9No penalties for white male Republicans because IOKIYAR — it’s OK if you are Republican — no matter what the crime or how skeezy, sleazy they are…only Democrats and people of color will be held to account.
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